Introduction

Ian Powell brings his camera to places that most people never see and uses the medium of photography as a means of explanation of large scale pragmatism. As both an Ironworker and welder, some of the sites he has worked on include Vancouver Grain Terminals, Water Reservoir connection tunnels, Kitimat Aluminum smelter, shipyards, Highland Copper, the Convention center, the Telus building and recently the Skytrain expansion.

With an eye for lines and light, he brings industry to art and shows us that beauty be found in some of the harshest corners of the industrial and construction world. The idea that the beauty of massive structures can be revealed by showing its subtle details–or that the whole can be seen in its parts–comes from his education in Chinese medicine and his practice of acupuncture in British-Columbia, Japan and China.

As an avid hiker, a former ski instructor in Switzerland and Australia, his landscape pictures aim to share a feeling of Mono No Aware, 物の哀れ, a type of awareness of impermanence, which brings a comfortable loneliness.

Both being in unconventional places and having unconventional views of common places, he shows a hidden world all around us.